Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Money, Women and Guns (Universal, 1958)

Jock solves the crime

Jock Mahoney was a great hero of mine
when I was a small boy because I was an avid follower of The Range Rider. As an adult I came to realize that he wasn’t the
most natural of actors, though he was damn good at riding and Tarzanesque
stunts. He stunted and doubled in a host of Westerns but he also did a few
big-screen oaters as lead, such as Money,
Women and Guns in 1958 (the year Yancey
Derringer started). Despite the rather lurid title, it’s a straight Western
whodunnit.

Quite entertaining

Jock is “the greatest detective in the
West”, Silver Ward Hogan, who wears a fancy rig decked out in the precious
metal and uses Lone Rangerish silver bullets as well. He is hired to find out
who murdered crusty old miner Ben Merriweather (Edwin Jerome). Merriweather was
ambushed by three men while working his claim. He got two of them but the third
escaped. He just had time to scribble a will on an old piece of a dynamite box.
But he seemed to be indicating with his dying breath that one of the heirs was
the guilty one. Rather odd. That’s pretty well all Silver has to go on.

There follows a lengthy investigation in
which all sorts of characters are visited as inheritors and/or suspects. One of
them is a glam redhead, naturally, Mary (Kim Hunter, replacing Barbara Hale, too
busy on Perry Mason). She has a young
son Davy (Tim Hovey) so we pretty well know right away that Silver, Mary and
Davy will become a new nuclear family, just as in Hondo, Yuma, The Tin Star and countless others.
They’ll probably go to California. They usually do.

Silver meets his future family

It’s quite interesting in that all the
heirs have a guilty secret but they repent and live better lives afterwards, all
without violence. The film is episodic, a series of barely related sketches. It
was apparently supposed originally to be a Capra-esque Christmas tale with the
word dreams replacing guns, and indeed, there are residues of
the Christmas spirit with the storekeeper’s sign announcing MERY CRISMAS to his
customers and the boy hoping Santa will bring him some red boots (Santa
obliges).

Frosty at first but then it's lerve

The picture was written by Montgomery Pittman
(who did mostly TV work though he did write the entertaining Rails into Laramie) for director Richard
Bartlett, a prolific director and producer of TV Westerns who worked on pretty
well every Western TV show you care to name, especially Riverboat and Cimarron City
but who also did some big-screen Westerns in the mid-50s, three of them with Mahoney
as lead.

Montgomery Pittman

Gene Evans is the sheriff and Lon Chaney
surprises by being honest against all expectations. Franklyn Farnum is the
(uncredited) postmaster.

One heir, known only as Judas, is
especially hard to track down.

It’s a bit short on action but I found
it all rather enjoyable, I must say.

5 comments:

Jeff, maybe we are around the same age as I also grew up with "THE RANGE RIDER".(I still get considerable pleasure from it today; the stunts alone are well worth the price of admission).

"MONEY, WOMEN AND GUNS" I only saw for the first time a few years ago. It is episodic and not exactly brimming with action yet I find it all rather charming. The film looks gorgeous too in cinemascope and technicolor and Jock looks great in his Silver Ward outfit.

Me too. I don't think Jock/Jack was ever in danger of winning an Oscar but to a Western-loving boy he was the tops.As to age, your Jeff first saw the light of day in the year of Red River, Fort Apache, Yellow Sky, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and VERY many other great movies. Not that I was yet quite old enough to appreciate them. That came later.Jeff

Jeff and Jerry. Sign me up as being a fan of Jock(Jocko to his friends) Mahoney. I like to watch him on the move, whether it be running, jumping, or riding. Also, liked his TV show YANCY DERRINGER(1958-59).